John Walker, Tech Executive Who Popularized AutoCAD, Dies at 74

John Walker, a groundbreaking, if reclusive, technology entrepreneur and polymath who was a founder and chief executive of Autodesk, the company that brought the ubiquitous AutoCAD software program to the design and architecture masses, died on Feb. 2 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. He was 74.

His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of head injuries he suffered in a fall at home, his wife, Roxie Walker, said. His death was not widely reported at the time.

Mr. Walker was well known in tech circles, not just for his triumphs in business but also for his outsize skills as a programmer — he was credited with developing an early prototype of the computer virus — and as a voluble writer who filled his personal site, Fourmilab, with free-ranging musings on topics as diverse as cryptography, nanotechnology and consciousness studies.

Although he had little taste for publicity, he became a prominent tech mogul of the 1980s and early ’90s as a founder of Autodesk Inc., once described as “a theocracy of hackers,” which grew to become the sixth-largest personal computer software company in the world.

In 1982, he pulled together 15 other programming mavericks to form Autodesk. The company’s original product was an office automation program by the same name, but it was a different software product the company introduced that same year that would send Autodesk into the tech stratosphere.

AutoCAD — the “CAD” stands for computer-aided design — was based on a program called Interact created by Michael Riddle, another company founder. With the contributions of Mr. Walker as well as Greg Lutz, who was also a founder, and the rest of the team, AutoCAD would go on to revolutionize industries including architecture, graphic design and engineering by allowing design professionals to ditch their pencils and paper and render their creations on a screen using an inexpensive personal computer.